New ways of mapping knowledge organization systems, using a semi-automatic matching-procedure for building up vocabulary crosswalks

Crosswalks between different vocabularies are an indispensable prerequisite for integrated and high quality search scenarios in distributed data environments. Offered through the web and linked with each other they act as a central link so that users can move back and forth between different data sources available online. In the past, crosswalks between different thesauri have primarily been developed manually. In the long run the intellectual updating of such crosswalks requires huge personnel expenses. Therefore, an integration of automatic matching procedures, as for example Ontology Matching Tools, seems an obvious need.
On the basis of computer generated correspondences between the Thesaurus for Economics (STW) and the Thesaurus for the Social Sciences (TheSoz) our contribution will explore cross-border approaches between IT-assisted tools and procedures on the one hand and external quality measurements via domain experts on the other hand. The techniques that emerge enable semi-automatically performed vocabulary crosswalks.